Amazon's Personal Reviews 19 years, 9 months ago by Martey Dodoo

As all of the tech media websites have been talking about, Amazon has changed its review system to include "Real Names." They explain their rationale thusly:

In general, we believe that a community in which people use their Real Names will ultimately have higher quality content, since an author willing to sign his or her real-world name on a piece of content is essentially saying "With my real-world identity, I stand by what I have written here."

However, the web is rife with speculation that this is to directly combat authors from positively reviewing their own books; a widespread practice. However, since I do not write book reviews on Amazon and do not use them when buying books (since the majority of books I purchase are ordained by college professors), I did not think this news would affect me very much.

Some minutes ago, I was reading Pitchfork's review of Bad Religion's "The Empire Strikes First." It sounded interesting enough so I went over to Amazon to look at the tracklist. While I am not a Bad Religion fanboy or anything, I have listened to a few of their older songs, and I can remember when "Sorrow," the first single from their 2002 album "The Process of Belief" was in radio rotation. There is a notable difference in the band's sound. Assuming that they would be lots of reviews, I looked forward to seeing a flamewar ("I know other reviewers have claimed the new sound of %BAND% sucks and their new pop sound means they have sold out, but last night, God came down from Heaven and told me %ALBUM% is a natural step in %BAND%'s evolution...)

I was disappointed to find despite the fact it was released two months ago and was the "#29 Early Adopter Product in Alternative Rock," there was only 1 review. I was skimming over the name (noting it had one of those silly "Real Name" badges) and location when I realized I knew that name. Since the location was "Cambridge, MA," I was certain that the reviewer was one of my classmates at Harvard. While I initially found myself swayed into considering an impulse purchase (Revisions, a compilation of alternate history stories, was released today; since it has a story co-authored by Cory Doctorow, I was thinking about purchasing it), but decided against it after reading some of my friend's other reviews (Five stars for AFI's Sing the Sorrow?). Besides, I recently made the large purchase of a laptop (a Dell Inspiron 9100, which will hopefully be delivered soon) and I am in much more of a Pixies mood right now.

It seems like this blog is becoming more like a LiveJournal diary every day...

Current mood: whimsical.